Scroll the menu to find all the places to visitScroll the menu to find all the places to visit
28 Apr 2009
Today I was taking part in an online presentation from Dr. Simon Ball of JISC TechDis; one of his regular HE updates. They use an online presentation system known as Instant Presenter to deliver the presentations on a roughly quarterly basis and they last for about half an hour. A genuine whistle-stop tour.
Read More
28 Apr 2009
When I’m asked about setting up a new wiki for a group, I often recommend PBWiki as it has a number of good features and for education it can be used for free. Since I work within the HE sector this is a simple and quick solution for many of the cross-institutional groups and many people are familiar with it.
Read More
27 Apr 2009
I’ve recently been helping some colleagues develop some reporting templates and they had a very particular requirement around drop down lists (which I’ll probably post about at some point in the future). One issue that did occur however was that the dynamic lists that were incorporated into the workbook were added to and even though I had mentioned to the users about using Excel’s name manager to redefine the range of cells with that name, they forgot and inevitably the workbook would end up back with me to rectify.
Read More
24 Apr 2009
For the second time this week I’ve been out of the office and working in one of York’s many hotels. This time rather than a team away day I was at The Grange Hotel attending the first of a series of workshops on Evidence Net.
Read More
22 Apr 2009
Today has been a very busy day! An early start saw me pulling together a variety of thoughts and pieces of information in preparation for the Higher Education Academy’s ICT team away day. This was the first away day the team had ever had and there was certainly some apprehension as to how the day would pan out.
Read More
21 Apr 2009
Unfortunately due to illness it’s taken me a couple of extra days to put this together, but at the weekend I attended The Gadget Show Live (GSL) at the NEC, Birmingham. The Gadget Show is a UK television programme shown on Channel 5. Each series has a weekly show and it showcases new technologies and compares leading products against one another. it’s usually a good watch and the journalistic comparison is presented at a layman level and at the same time tends to offer some insightful points on practicalities of individual items.
Read More
17 Apr 2009
A little while ago I received a request for the installation of Spotify on a work computer. I’d not heard of it at this point so I did some research and discovered that it was a piece of software that linked you to a massive library of music on the Internet. After a bit of discussion in trying to ascertain what the business case was for installing this to a work computer it faded away.
Read More
16 Apr 2009
I recently came across a site called TED. It’s a web site for the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. The web site itself has a showcase of videos clips from conference speakers and is worth a look. The thing I want to quickly post about however is something I think is quite innovative … an interface I’ve not seen anywhere else (yet).
Read More
16 Apr 2009
Since I had my Omina problems the other week (it’s about to go in for repair as there are still some strange hardware issues) I lost lots of basic information on the phone. One of the things I lost was the ring tone. I can’t remember what I had before, but I like to have something simple and professional that won’t cost me and won’t embarrass me in the office. I don’t want the latest polyphonic chart hit blaring from my pocket as I sit at my desk.
Read More
08 Apr 2009
I deal with a fair few academics and if there’s one thing they love about the Internet and the World Wide Web it’s YouTube and the vast resources it offers. Giving multimedia presentations is obviously a great way of getting people engaged, but an issue is that when visiting an institution you can’t always guarantee that you will have access to the Internet so being able to download a video from YouTube is a huge benefit.
Read More